The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Of course, his lawyers altered matters considerably. I’m a handshake man. I do business with a firm grip and leave it to others to handle the details. Tammen’s wolves drafted a contract with some boilerplate I didn’t quite grasp and I signed it without a close look. I don’t see well any more anyway. It wasn’t Harry’s fault. It was those beagles he sets to baying after anyone he does business with.

  In spite of all that, once he foreclosed on me and my show I found him a pleasant partner. He was paying me good money to appear, and I did appear for a hundred dollars a day and a piece of the action. I never got him paid back, he told me, even though by my accounting I did. He said his blasted lawyers and accountants had found all sorts of charges against the profits, and the combined Sells-Floto and Buffalo Bill Show didn’t earn a nickel. Well, I don’t know about that. I think all this was the work of his sleeve-garter-men who squint at numbers and have no heart.

  As for Harry, he’s a prince, and I don’t mind saying so in this memoir. I signed up for a second season and that tells the story.

  Chapter 6

  Annie Oakley

  They would not let poor Mr. Cody die in peace. Two days before his death the news reports began pouring in, and the press treated us to its usual inventions. It was said that as he failed he played cards with his family.

  I doubt it.

  We weren’t surprised. When we crossed paths with the colonel two or three years ago both my husband and I thought he looked frail. He had aged terribly. But that didn’t keep him from touring with the show or talking irrepressibly about the future. Nor had age bent him. He still stood straight as a golf club and still had about him a royal presence, that aura that set him apart from all other people.

  The news of Cody’s death reached us by wire at Pinehurst, the lovely North Carolina resort not far from Fayetteville where we have wintered for several years. I suppose years on the road have turned us into migratory people and this is where we alight now for golf, shooting, and good company. We are at home wherever we may be but especially here.

  Of course newsmen approached me at once and I told them in all earnestness that Buffalo Bill Cody was a most admirable and honorable person whose word was his bond, whose abilities were larger than legend, and whose only weakness was a generosity so grand that he could not hang on to all the wealth he had acquired. He had made millions and tossed millions out upon the western breezes. If he had faults I did not mention them, wanting the memory of them to vanish so that in time the world will only know the greatness of the man.

  I wondered what to tell the reporters.

  I remembered that winter noon in New York City when my husband and the Colonel and I had stepped out of the stage door into a cruel blizzard and discovered a group of ragged men huddled miserably there, hoping for some handouts. Frank and I started to brush past but the Colonel took sympathy upon them, hunted through his pockets for something to give them, found he had almost nothing, and finally asked Frank and me if we had cash. All told, we scratched up twenty-five dollars and this the colonel doled out to the twenty-three hoboes, a dollar apiece, holding back two dollars for our own lunches.

  “This will buy you a hot lunch and a flop,” he said to this haggard men. “It’s too cold for fellows like you to be outside.”

  We watched that knot of tormented men dissolve and we continued on our way. Cody’s gesture filled me with tenderness and a bit of shame, too, for I would have ignored those wretches.

  Cody repaid us the next day. He always did.

  He died broke. A man who had given away so much, digging into his pocket for everyone who came to him with some crazy gold-brick scheme or hard-luck story, ought to have died in comfort and free from worry. But it was not to be. He was a different sort of man, a Western sort, expansive and generous and impulsive too, and not at all like me or my dear Frank.

  I think Will Cody would be alive right now if I weren’t for that awful Harry Tammen and his brigands at the Denver Post. Their conniving killed Will. It’s as plain as that. I feel that right down to my marrow. Somehow, I don’t know the details, Tammen got his claws into Will Cody and the next thing Will knew, his Wild West was being auctioned off. Three decades of a great show, all of it vanishing in hours under the hard rap of the auction hammer. His silver-mounted saddle, his white horse, the old Deadwood Stage which had seen history in its cramped interior, all of it went under the hammer, mostly to the Miller Brothers 101 Show. I wish they'd had the decency to give back to the old man much of what they bought, but it is a very hard world those people inhabit.

  And after the Buffalo Bill show was auctioned, Will Cody started to die and kept on dying a bit day by day for two or three more years. But not without a brave struggle. He did two seasons with Sells-Floto, he made that film for Essanay, spent a final season with the Miller 101 Show, and talked brightly of new seasons, But Tammen had gutted him like a hanging deer and each day his lifeblood ebbed. At the end, the best Will Cody could manage was a carriage ride, his body as straight in the carriage seat as it had been on his last white charger, McKinley.

  It's being said that Will had a hand in his own demise. He was so prodigal with money. But Will didn’t kill himself; that very prodigality was what infused each of his days with joy. The look in a child’s eyes when Buffalo Bill gave him a dime for some licorice was what drove the colonel on. No, the Denver Post and its squalid connivers put Will Cody into his coffin and even now they are trying to make a spectacle of Will’s death because they see the profit in it.

  I prefer to live in the east where people are more civilized. I will avoid Denver, polluted by that awful newspaper, the rest of my life.

  In fact, the first thing that struck me, upon the colonel’s death, was that we were here at a fine east coast resort, easterners to our very bone, while he was out in his beloved West when death took him. For years, we have migrated between New York and Florida, finding ourselves at home in New York state and the Carolinas or Maryland where we had a place on the shore, and various Atlantic beaches. There we were, playing in his Wild West but we had scarcely been west of Ohio and didn’t really care for those treeless spaces out there or the rough life of the westerner.

  I felt a great tenderness in me that wouldn’t depart when I read that the colonel had died at his sister’s home in Denver. He seemed a paradox, at once manly and strong and yet still a gentle and trusting boy, and I loved both sides of him. I felt protected by his strength and nurtured by his tenderness. He was just as kind and affectionate toward Frank as he was to me and welcomed my husband into the show with all the esteem he gave to me.

  Even now, as I muse upon all those years with him and the Wild West, I feel a profound sorrow. Loss, yes, but tenderness, as if our souls were fated to be boon companions, walking side by side through life's adventures. Apart from Frank, there was no one more important to me than Will Cody, and because of him I have enjoyed a very good life.

  We met, I guess it was in 1885, in New Orleans where we were stranded and Cody’s Wild West had spent a miserable season mired in mud. Frank and I had a sharpshooter act. We had been booked at fairs and exhibitions and for some while we were a feature of the Sells Brothers Circus. But suddenly, we were adrift in a strange hard city and the only prospect was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. So we went to him, found him in a well-appointed tent on the Wild West grounds, a Brussels carpet on the earth and all the comforts of a hotel room at hand.

  He greeted us with a cheerful wave of the hand. Was ever Buffalo Bill not cheerful or hospitable?

  I let Frank talk. He was so good at it, and he managed our act so well.

  “Annie’s a crack shot, Mr. Cody. She shoots a dime from my fingers. She’ll shoot the ash off a cigarette. She can shoot two clay pigeons after picking up her gun. She’ll shatter glass balls, one after another. She’s beaten some of the best marksmen in the world in regular competition. The public marvels at her.”

  Cody smiled. “Well, that’s remarkable but we’re overloade
d with sharpshooters. That’s just one part of the Wild West, you know. Trick shots. I do some myself from a running horse.”

  “I think you’ll like Annie so much that we’ll give you three performances without pay so you can see her before audiences,” Frank said. “And then you can decide.”

  Cody stared at me, seeing a compact female in her mid-twenties, scarcely the sort of pioneer woman one would expect in the Wild West. I love to wear pretty things and on this occasion I was dressed in hand-embroidered skirts and a loose-fitting blouse. I could almost hear his thoughts. What could a little thing like that do with a heavy gun? And how well would she hold up? The traveling show wasn’t for faint-hearted women.

  I saw how it was going and thought surely we’d be turned down. He dismissed us without committing and I thought we’d be looking for a berth in some other show. But then, unknown to us, Cody got word from his partner Nate Salsbury that his sharpshooter, Doctor Bogardus, was leaving the show, and in a day or so Buffalo Bill offered us our chance.

  “We’re opening in Louisville,” he said. “I’ll take you up on your three-performance offer, Mr. Butler. We’ll give you a try.”

  That was all it took. We hastened north, arrived at the show ground at a time when the Wild West was parading through town to drum up trade and Buffalo Bill Cody was nowhere in sight. There would be a show later that day.

  “Frank, I need some practice,” I said.

  We headed into the hushed arena, where I set up my traps, my rifles and shotguns on a table, and began banging away. Little did I know I had a spectator. Just one, and he wearing a cutaway black coat and bowler, staring from the silent stands. I did all the things I do, the trick shots, the backward shots using a mirror, the glass balls. Frank helped me as he always does, having given his whole life to furthering my career.

  Our sole spectator turned out to be Nate Salsbury, Cody’s partner and co-owner of the Wild West. He hired us on the spot, though I didn’t know for how much or how long or what the conditions might be. I laughed softly. Our luck held. Somehow, we had always been lucky, Frank and I.

  “Now, that’s an act to wow them all, little lady. I’ll tell Cody I’ve hired you,” he said. “You’re just what we needed. You got some photos? I’m going to feature you on the broadsides.”

  I stared at Mr. Salsbury, amazed. It was all happening so fast.

  They loved our act that afternoon. I saw Mr. Cody studying us, absorbing the mood of the crowd as I shattered ball after ball. I had developed a simple little prelude in which I danced into the arena, skipped along like a young girl, blowing kisses at the audience, all the while in my embroidered shooting clothes.

  Afterward I saw him pacing up to us, and I waited, uncertainly. “That was a marvel, Missie,” Cody said as Frank collected the rifles, and I bowed.

  I was Missie ever after.

  After the show, he collected his entire crew and introduced me.

  “This Missie is Annie Oakley, and she’s going to be part of the show,” he said. “And this is her husband, Frank Butler, who will be with us also. She's the only woman in the show and I want you to protect her.”

  That was chivalrous, and his word was law, and in all the time I was with the Wild West I was protected and cared for by the crews. I was safe every day I was with the Wild West and so were the many women who came to the show later.

  Still, there had been nothing but a handshake and I wondered what sort of contract we might sign. There was none, at least at first. A handshake was bond enough. They paid us a hundred a week which was more than we had expected, enough to get along on and put something by. Frank and I both knew what it is like to be poor, go hungry, yearn for things we couldn’t have, sometimes something as humble as a sheltered place to sleep.

  I was a slip of a girl when I lost my father. My poor mother struggled to feed us; at one point she farmed me out to an abusive couple who beat me and starved me. At another point I worked for the managers of the county poor farm in Ohio where I grew up. Frank’s family in Ireland wasn’t much better off and from the moment he stepped off the boat he was determined to get ahead any way he could. So a hundred dollars a week seemed grand, and we spent as little as we could and socked away all that we could, knowing that acts die, shows fold, and there was little help for a show person out on the streets.

  I sensed that Cody wanted to ask me questions about myself, about our future, about my husband and me, and the act; wanted some sort of private information he was reluctant to bring up. But for a while I didn’t know what that might be. I only knew that something about our understanding was incomplete, just as the handshake was an incomplete contract. He would glance at me with a question in his eyes and little did I know that the glance was more than casual. A year or so had passed before I had any fathoming of what it was that was worrying him. And when I think of that, I smile.

  (From Colonel William F. Cody’s memoir)

  When I first saw Annie Oakley I wondered whether she was big enough to shoot a rifle. She was a little bit of a thing and I couldn’t imagine she could endure much of the abuse of the road.

  I intuitively called her Missie from the moment I saw her, and have often wondered why. She was no maiden, but Mrs. Frank Butler, and yet to me she was a maiden. I took a long look at those embroidered shirts and vests she wore, at her compact form, and I simply saw a girl. Now, in my old age, I grasp that I wanted to see only the girl; I didn’t want to see the woman who was all too attractive to me.

  I confess I visited their tent often in those early months and years, sitting there before it while she brewed some tea. The Butlers never touched spirits. I was insatiably curious about her though I don’t quite know why. I wanted to know all about how she learned to shoot. Few enough western women shoot, but Annie was from Ohio, settled country, and I couldn’t imagine how she became familiar with firearms or learned to shoot dimes held between fingers without ever failing.

  She was a sensation, of course, and right from the start. Nate Salsbury saw it before I did. He often drifted into the audience and absorbed what was exciting and intriguing our spectators. And Annie was the one they whispered about, cheered, applauded, and gazed at with dreams in their eyes. Even more amazing, whenever Annie began shooting, the shots sharp in the air, women fainted. It was all too much for their delicate constitutions to behold a slip of a woman handling a rifle or a shotgun with ease. We saw women faint with almost every performance and always after Annie’s guns began cracking regularly.

  I found out after much questioning that she had taught herself marksmanship as a wee girl; that she had taken a rifle off its pegs over the fireplace and gone out to hunt because her impoverished family needed the food. She roamed the woodlands, never wasting a shot because there wasn’t a cent for powder and ball, and a missed shot meant hunger. She brought home squirrels and rabbits and anything edible and these made their way into the stomachs of that hard-pressed family. Things only got worse and in time she was sent to the county poor farm, and that is where she learned her needlework.

  So there she was, an eastern girl with a western skill, and it fascinated me. I just couldn’t know enough about her so I would peer furtively into her tidy quarters while we sipped the Oolong, and I couldn’t help but gaze on the twin metal beds pressed tight together. It didn’t seem right, somehow, that she was a married woman and that she had Frank Butler shared a life together on the road.

  They were always a little apart from the rest of the show, living temperately, spending as little as they could, as if they knew a rainy day would descend at any moment. I never heard them employ the coarse language of the tent show and the roustabouts and the cowboys. Every word from their mouths was gracious and civil.

  Perhaps it was the way she entered the arena that enchanted me. She tripped in lightly, her smiles, kisses, and soft embroidered skirts making her girlish. She seemed the last woman on earth to handle weapons. It was that virginal quality I cherished, and it obsessed me. I wanted her to remai
n just like that for as long as the show was in my hands. She might be married to Butler but to me she really was Missie, just as I called her from the beginning.

  I was more curious about her than I should have been, more curious than propriety permitted and yet I could not help myself. I wanted to know everything about her and her life with Frank Butler. And to this day I don’t quite know why, but I am not happy with myself when I think back upon my rampant curiosity about Annie. I was almost as curious about Frank Butler and watched closely to see what magical hold he had on Annie. But he was always the quiet, reticent fellow, who could occasionally coach her through a new technique. He was there, Annie’s shadow and lover and friend, and I came to feel he was a silent wall standing between Missie and me.

  I was truly conflicted when I thought about her skills. I wanted her to do better than I could, yet I wanted her to fail so that I might remain the premier sharpshooter in the Wild West. I would watch, waiting for her to miss, secretly gloating when she missed, worried that her new tricks, which she steadily developed over the years we were on the trail together, would win more applause than my own trick shooting from horseback. I was simultaneously envious and yet wishing her even greater success, as she perfected one breathtaking trick after another, winning gasps and applause from audiences all over this Republic and Europe.

  She didn’t need to employ ruses, either. Her aim was so fine she could employ rifles rather than shotguns loaded with fine shot or sand.